Fun on Friday

Here's a Web site dedicated to helping you in your lifelong quest to determine the number of people who share your name:  HOW MANY OF ME?

In case you're curious, there are 4,818,707 people in the U.S. with the name of Robert (the third most popular first name); there are 2,906 with the last name of Westfield; and there are 46 people named Robert Westfield (hopefully none of them is a serial killer or on the no-fly list).

There are fewer than 1,529 people with the first name of Cayce; there are 2,233 with the Crown surname; but we are proud to announce that, according to this site, there is only ONE Cayce Crown.  (I could have told you that.)

How many of YOU?

Birthday Singing!

Another delightful tidbyte from Cayce:

Spread the LOVE!!!

Happy Birthday Day!!!!!

The major holiday I celebrate between Presidents' Day and St. Patrick's Day is my birthday.  This is why I hate when people slander the month of February, which they often do in the northern hemisphere because it's dark and cold and the end of winter, etcetera, etcetera, blah, blah, blah.

February is the time of birthday celebrations--of ice skating and skiing and bowling and scavenger hunts at the museum (which is how I'm celebrating my birthday this year).  When I hear people talking about birthdays at the beach or by the pool, I feel sorry for them.  Birthdays are supposed to be in late February and it's sad to learn that so many people choose to celebrate birthdays on any day of the year.  I even know people who observe their birthdays in early September, which is insane, because all their gifts come from back-to-school sales. 

Anyway, the official Birthday Day is February 26th.  And who else was wise enough to emerge from the womb on February 26th?  Well, there's Good King Wenceslaus (the duke and saint of Bohemia, who once looked out on the Feast of Stephen); dramatist Christopher Marlowe; Utilitarianist Jeremy Bentham; author Victor Hugo; artist Honore Daumier; Levi Strauss; "Buffalo Bill" Cody; Corn Flake King John Kellogg; actor William Frawley; chemist Herbert Dow; Tex Avery; Jackie Gleason; Tony Randall; Fats Domino; Ariel Sharon; Johnny Cash; Robert Novak; Michael Bolton; Michel Houellebecq; Erykah Badu; and swimmer Jenny Thompson. 

What happened on this day in Big Apple history?

In 1870, Alfred Beach's pneumatic subway opened to the public. It only ran one block up Broadway from Murray to Warren, but built secretly in view of City Hall, it demonstrated that a subway could be constructed in the bustling city of New York.  The first real subway line would open thirty-four years later.

Less inspiring:  on my 21st birthday, in 1993, a truck bomb exploded beneath the Twin Towers, killing six and injuring one thousand, the first attack on the World Trade Center. 

Finally, in the world outside of the Big Apple, February 26th has given us lots of uprisings and banking milestones as well as the following events...some great, some horrible:  Napoleon escapes from Elba (1815); the Second French Republic is declared (1848); the first jazz record is recorded (1917); the Grand Canyon and Grand Teton National Parks open (1919 and 1929); the Luftwaffe is reformed (1935); Churchill announces that England has an atomic bomb (1952); NPR is incorporated (1970); Saddam Hussein announces withdrawal from Kuwait (1991); the Taliban destroys the famous Buddha statues in Bamyan (2001); and the war/genocide in Darfur begins (2003).

Earthquakes in New York City

Last month, while I was in west Los Angeles, talking with my brother in his kitchen, the earth shook.  It was a 3.4 earthquake whose epicenter was just off the coast.  I didn't even know it was an earthquake until all the Californians started talking about it. The thud felt like a truck drove by, hit a pothole and rattled the windows. 

It made me wonder about New York's earthquakes. 

New York City's biggest faultline is visible to the naked eye--125th Street, Manhattanville, the rock valley where the IRT which has been underground suddenly emerges into the open air, traverses an elevated track several stories above your head and then disappears into the ground again.

Last August, there was a report in Scientific Blogging about a study by a group of seismologists that "suggests that a pattern of subtle but active faults makes the risk of earthquakes to the New York City area substantially greater than formerly believed.  Among other things, they say that the controversial Indian Point nuclear power plants, 24 miles north of the city, sit astride the previously unidentified intersection of two active seismic zones."

Oh, good.  This takes my mind off the economy.

Follow this link to see the 18 largest earthquakes in the New York City area, according to the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University.

What Would Your Billboard Say?

 

Sean Hannity on one side; the Dalai Lama on the other; and for those who aren't interested in either, there's always Mamma Mia.

 

DALAI LAMA:  He doesn't just wish for peace.  He works for it.  HOPE.  Pass it on.

SEAN HANNITY:  You know he's right.

Two different souls.

Brooks Brothers, Kim's Video, Oscar Wilde, and the Sports Museum...Closings, Closings and Closings

I can't keep up with all the closings.  Every time I go for a walk or open the paper, I see that some other minor institution has closed.  This empty box, pictured on the left, was the Brooks Brothers store on Fifth Avenue.  Gone.  Since I don't throw lawn parties for my banker friends, I never actually shopped there, but I did use the storefront on my tours--to discuss the oldest clothier in the U.S. and the first in the country to sell ready-made suits and buttondown Oxford shirts (the latter for the last 109 years).  Besides dressing some of the most famous figures in American history (from Lincoln to F.D.R.), Brooks Brothers supplied the uniforms for the Union Army and played a large role in transforming New York City into a garment capital.  Their flagship, since 1915, on Madison at 44th, is still open (I think it is...who knows anymore?) but their presence on Fifth has gone the way of Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns.

Recently, New York Magazine, in their Freakoutonomics feature, listed the following closings:  Love Saves the Day (East Village), Le Gamin (Houston), DT-UT (Second Avenue and 84th Street), most of the shoe stores on 8th Street (but since the shoe stores on 8th Street supplanted all of the bookstores on 8th Street, I'm not shedding a tear over these), Key (Grand Street), Fresh (Reade Street), Jefferson Market (Sixth Avenue), Old Devil Moon (East Village),Trout (Boerum Hill), Chocolate Bar (West Village), and Cafe 79 (79th Street and First Avenue...a neighborhood diner that had been there for 35 years!!!!).

And what else?  Well, there's the famous Kim's Video, which began in 1987 with 8000 movies and whose collection (much bigger now) is being shipped in its entirety to a foundation in Sicily.  Read the New York Times article.

At the end of the month the legendary Oscar Wilde Bookshop will also shut its doors.  I gave a reading there with Ellis Avery last December, but my favorite memory is walking through the Village with my parents the week my first novel, Suspension, was published.  They were tagging along with me that day as I signed stock in several stores.  I would sign and my father would move copies, already well displayed, into what he believed were more prominent spots.  He was the one who first saw Suspension in the window at Oscar Wilde.  He was the one to point it out and I'll never forget his excitement. 

Finally, I didn't have time to form memories of The Sports Museum of America, which opened only last May in the Standard Oil Building at the foot of Broadway.  What was intended in part to be the new home to the Heisman Trophy and its history, the Sports Museum closed after business on Friday. 

Think of All the Students, Think of All the Pills

A dealer at Ellis Island?  Nope, this is a teacher who brings middle school students from Orange County, California to New York City and Washington every February.  Last weekend he brought almost two hundred of them.  Now with all those kids come allergies, viruses, nausea, etc., so before the trip, he goes on a shopping spree at Costco and then divides the goods among the five chaperones, who each carry a plastic bag like the one pictured.  The total inventory?

400 Benadryls

400 Ibuprofens

400 Tylenols

600 Tums

96 Daytime Cold Tylenol

48 Nighttime Cold Tylenol

90 Airbornes

5 bottles of Visine

60 Dramamines

15 bags of Ricola and Halls Cough Drops

10 packs of tissues

5 First Aid Kits

 

And, believe it or not, while they were in New York, one of the guides still had to make three different runs to the drugstore!!!!!

Hope You're Having a Happy Stroessenreuthing New Year!!

If you read about my Christmas trip to LA in January, you would remember that I believe holidays should be celebrated when it's convenient for us.  SO:  a New Year's Eve memory.

In 2006, Travis Stroessenreuther, who has appeared in several of our bytes, spent all night in Central Park to snag some free tickets for Meryl Streep in Mother Courage.  Read Stroessenreuther in the Park for the embarrassing punchline.  For that nocturnal excursion, Travis sent out a mass e-mail, asking who was with him.  The answer?  No one.  And that's how Travis ended up meeting Daryl and Emily...but that's another story.

Anyway, Travis did the same thing for this New Year's Eve --Travis Stroessenreuther, a New Yorker since 1997, decided to revel in Times Square to watch the ball drop.  That's right.  A New Yorker.  In Times Square.

Here's Travis:

The countdown is the most important part.  It's that moment of renewal, of re-evaluation.  That second of the very loud clock ticking from one chapter of your life into the next.  I've spent New Year's Eve in a wide variety of places: with just my wife outside Boston; looking at the fireworks over the beautiful beaches of Rio de Janeiro; and at numerous wonderful house parties.  I have always counted down to the New Year.  The countdown is the most important part.

2008 was a mediocre year.  I mean, all the important things in my life were great.  My health, wonderful.  My marriage, never better.  A new president, thank God.  But it was just sorta... well... flat.  No big career advancements.  Nothing that really grabbed me.  In November, I began to put my energies into making 2009 amazing.  How could I kick that off right?  Give it the jumpstart that it needed?

Times Square.  New Year's Eve.  Of course. 

I thought to myself, "People come from all over the world to freeze in Times Square and watch the ball drop.  They pay stupid prices for hotels, plane tickets, meals, etc. I live twenty minutes away and, after being here nearly twelve years, I've never done it.  And what better way to kick off 2009 than with a million other people who also think it's going to be an amazing year? THIS IS THE YEAR TO STAND IN TIMES SQUARE!"

So, I set about my plans.  I invited a hundred people to join me.  Literally.  One hundred people.  No one did.  My wife (bless her soul) hates the cold and was planning to yoga the new year in.  "I'll see you at the party afterwards!"

The last person to bail on me did so at noon, saying, "Aw, man, it's cold out there.  You're not going through with this, are you?"

So I would be alone with a million people.  Somehow, I was really OK with that.

I dress in layers (knowing it's getting down to fifteen degrees), pack snacks (Cliff Bars, bananas, and Spirulina Balls), and make my way down to Times Square.

Little Bytes Recommends THE BAGEL...The Book and the Bread

On our walk across 46th Street, when the absence of the Intrepid forced us to talk about bagels (Twelfth Avenue, Part Two), I said, "Bagels are first mentioned in municipal records in Poland in 1610.  The same year that Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale was produced.  They have nothing to do with each other!"  Then I moved on to discussing the Hudson.  Had no choice.

But back to bagels! 

A month or two ago I heard an interview with Maria Balinska, the author of The Bagel:  The Surprising History of a Modest Bread, who discussed the role of bagels as a fasting bread in Poland.

Recently, I found a great review of the book at Moment Magazine by Joan Nathan, author of seven books on Jewish cooking.  In the review, Nathan offers up two reasons why bagels came to be:

"Remarkably, Balinska found evidence from the 9th century that might explain why bagel dough is boiled before it is baked. A Polish decree of the time forbade Jews to bake bread because of the connection between bread and the body of Jesus Christ. But if dough was boiled first and then baked, it didn’t fall into the same category as bread and could be made and consumed."

"An alternative explanation that I heard from a member of the Beigel family holds that Jewish merchants from Krakow who traveled the countryside to sell their wares needed to take food with them to keep kosher on the road. According to Jewish law, eating bread at a meal requires a ritual washing of hands and a blessing over the food before eating. But in the countryside, that was difficult because of the risk of contracting typhus from impure water. The Beigel family, aware of this predicament, ingeniously decided to first boil the dough and then bake it, thus putting it in the category of noodles."

Read the review for more information on the bagel and the book...and to learn what city's bagels Joan Nathan believes are "probably the best...in the world."  (It's not New York's!!!)  Follow the link.

Something on the lighter side to perk up Tuesday afternoon...

Another tidbyte from Cayce:

The Vandalism at Bethesda Terrace

(Photograph by Jen Chung/Gothamist)

At the beginning of the month, The Gothamist posted photos of the graffiti wilding that took place at Bethesda Terrace on Saturday night, January 31st.  Less than two years after the arcade was finally reopened to the public, it was criminally defaced by four socially defective morons--David Gonzalez Jr., 20, Aisha Calow, 18, Victoria Deniaminova, 16, and Sabrina Santiago, 16.  I would print their addresses if I had them.

My first view of the damage (estimates for its repair range from $50,000 to $100,000) was on Sunday.  Heartbreaking and infuriating.  My photos after the break. 

Happy Presidents' Day!

Apostrophe or no?  Always the question.  (Follow that link for more on the punctuation of Presidents' Day and Veterans Day.  Be warned of the title...the author is understandably frustrated.)

And now four questions for you:

What president is depicted in New York's oldest outdoor bronze statue?  And if that's too easy, what event is depicted? 

What president gave one of the most important political speeches of his career in the East Village?

What president besides Washington was sworn into office in Manhattan?

And last but not least:  WHO WAS THE ONLY PRESIDENT BORN IN NEW YORK CITY?

Answer after the jump.

Hot Dog Real Estate

To wrap up the Westminster week of New York City canines, here's a reprise of our hottest dogs...the ones you find in a car outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

A Byte of Balto

 

To continue the top dog theme of the week (not including yesterday's Lincoln tribute) here's our Balto blog, originally posted on March 27th:

While giving tours, I sometimes yield the floor to a specialist in the group--an engineer, architect or historian--or to a student who might have just finished a report on the subject for school.  On a recent stop at the statue of Balto in Central Park, an eighth-grader volunteered to tell the story.  Since she was from Ohio, I thought it possible that she was an authority--the real Balto lived out his life at the Cleveland Zoo and was subsequently stuffed and put on display at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. 

Judging from her lecture, quoted below, her research was clearly not conducted at a museum but came exclusively from the 1995 animated movie.

"Balto inspired the Iditarod race, because he brought medicine through a snowstorm all the way to a far part of Alaska.  They needed it or people would die and nobody thought he could do it.  The other dogs made fun of him and there was a rival dog who didn't want him on the team and there was a lot of prejudice because he wasn't a purebred, he was part wolf..."

I cut her off before she got to the love interest or Balto's comic sidekick, Boris the goose.  I had to explain that there were some differences between the movie and history and pointed out the well-known fact that, besides humans, only reindeer make fun of each other.

 

Happy Birthday, Abraham Lincoln!

This is a great video showing every known photograph (from 1846-1865) of our sixteenth president.

And the Winner Is...

STUMP!

The oldest dog ever to win Best in Show at Westminster. 

Stump (aka Ch Clussexx Three D Grinchy Glee) is a ten-year-old Sussex spaniel who was representing the SPORTING GROUP. 

Stump first won the Sporting Group in 2004 (before four of the other finalists were even born) and then fell sick with a mysterious and near-fatal illness that required a nineteen-day stay at Texas A&M's veterinary hospital.  But the champ (winner of 50 Best in Shows) not only survived but came back this year to reclaim the Group title and then take the whole shebang, beating out 2500 other dogs.

Stump is the first Sussex spaniel to win at Westminster. 

And let's not forget the two dogs who won their groups yesterday and competed with Stump and Mondays' winners in last night's Final Seven.

 

WORKING GROUP--Giant Schnauzer

CH Galilee's Pure Of Spirit (female)

 

TOY GROUP--Brussels Griffon

Ch Cilleine Masquerade (male)

 

Last Year's Winner...Uno, the Busy Beagle

Before the winner is announced tonight, let's remember 2008's winner, Uno the beagle, surely one of the most popular.  According to the Westminster website: 

2008--

"Uno" becomes the first Westminster winner to be invited to the White House, visiting President and Mrs. Bush in May, and later visits Texas Gov. Rick Perry at the capital in Austin.  He rings the bell to open the NASDAQ market, throws out the first pitch at major league baseball games in Milwaukee and St. Louis, is a celebrity headliner at various events, and visits children, soldiers, and other patients in hospitals and health care facilities around the country. In November, he rides on the Peanuts/United Media float in the world-famous Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. 

 

Read the great New York Times article about the busiest beagle.  There's a great photo of Uno with Snoopy.

From the archive, posted last February, 2008:

I attended the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show a couple times and can vouch for the absurd, throat-clenching tension you feel in the audience and the effusive adoration and reverent worship for the competing dogs.  I remember the giant white fluffy face of a bichon frise frozen high above us on the jumbotron watching over us all, like a canine deity, as we left the Garden.  From all reports, this year was one of the most exciting.  The crowd favorite, a beagle named Uno, who barked and bayed and jumped and tried to bite his leash, won Best in Show over the obligatory toy poodle (this one with over 200 championships to its name).  It was the first time since the 1980's that a dog from the Hound Group won; the first time since the 1930's that the Hound Group was represented by a beagle; and the first time ever that a beagle won Best in Show, even though the breed has been one of the ten most popular breeds since 1915.

WATCH UNO RECEIVE HIS RIBBON.

 

   AP Photo

Shannon Stapleton of Reuters took the first picture above.

Best in Group: The First Four Finalists

Here are the winners from last night's Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show:

 

HOUND GROUP--Scottish Deerhound

Champion Gayleward's Tiger Woods (male)

 

TERRIER GROUP--Scottish Terrier

(hm, another SCOTTISH something)

Ch. Roundtown Mercedes of Maryscot (female)

 

NON-SPORTING GROUP--Standard Poodle

(of course, because you can't have a Best in Show without the poofy poodle)

Champion Randenn Tristar Affirmation (female).

TRIVIA--This dog was born thirteen years after its father!!!!!  She's a petri dish poodle who is being treated like a messiah!!! She's had hundreds of puppies!!!!!   AAAAAAAA!!!!!!  (I just heard this on NPR while typing this entry.) 

 

HERDING GROUP--Puli

Champion Cordmaker Field of Dreams (male).

These are the dogs that look like mops.  I like them but wonder what it would feel like to pet them.

So here are the first four...two males, two females.

The first four finalists are also all black or gray--that might help a golden retriever should that breed win its group tonight.  Am I right?

The Favorites for Westminster...and Before They Were Stars

Time Out New York provides a list of this year's favorites.

My gut tells me it's going to be Lincoln, the Brussels griffon.

I've called it in the past.

Visit the Time Out page for photos and their rationale...and to see the favorites AS PUPPIES!!!!

Two More Closings

Wow, it's hard to keep up with the closings in 2009, but here are two more possibilities:

Governor's Island in New York Harbor, which has become one of the great summer escapes, might not reopen this spring since funds were not provided in Governor Patterson's executive budget.

Come on Patterson, it's GOVERNOR'S Island.

And the Amato Opera Company looks to end its run after sixty-one years...thanks in part to one of New York's worst landlords.  Read about the closing at the Gothamist or Curbed, and don't miss the piece about the opera itself posted last January in Vanishing New York.

Behind the Scenes with Patti Lupone

In the poll we posted back in December, Little Byters recommended Gypsy and Spring Awakening as the two shows to see before closing.  On January 11th, Gypsy played its final performance and last week's New York Magazine printed a wonderful behind-the-scenes photo journal (by Gillian Laub) of Patti Lupone on that day--from waking up in her windowless pied-a-terre through stretches in her dressing room and backstage respites to the curtain call and autographs at the stage door.  There are many more photos included online at their website.  To see all 37 pictures, view their slideshow.  

Trivia Question: 75 Years of Amateur Night at the Apollo

Last week, the legendary Apollo Theater in Harlem held a 75th anniversary celebration for its famous Amateur Night, which premiered in 1934.  The theater opened in 1914 as the Hurtig and Seamon's New Burlesque Theater, which admitted only white audiences.  In 1934, under new ownership, that policy changed and a show premiered that permitted audiences to boo amateur acts that didn't live up to their exectations.

My favorite story has to do with one of the first winners from that same year.  Orphaned at the age of 15, she escaped various state institutions and was living on the street when, on November 21st, she went to the Apollo to dance.  The act preceding hers, the Edwards Sisters, was one of Harlem's most famous dance duos; intimidated, the seventeen-year-old decided to sing instead.  She sang Judy and The Object of My Affection and won first prize.  Almost immediately, she began to work with bandleader Chick Webb on a journey that would make hers one of the most famous voices of the twentieth century.

NAME THAT SINGER!

If You Missed the de Montebello Show, Take a Virtual Tour

 The fantastic show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Phillippe de Montebello Years:  Curators Celebrate Three Decades of Acquisitions, closed this Sunday.  I visited several times, most recently on Friday, and was always entranced by something new.  The tribute, which was arranged in one of the larger exhibit spaces, was unique in the variety of objects on display.  There was no theme, no cultural or materialistic criteria to hold the items together.  These were simply objects acquired in the last thirty years from all eighteen departments of the museum, which meant that each room was almost cluttered with a mind blowing array of loot not likely to occupy the same room again.  One room, for example, held a Hauser guitar donated by Andres Segovia; a large Rothko painting; a bronze cast of Diana; the beautiful writing desk commissioned for Louis XIV; a marble bust of Robert Fulton; a flintlock gun from 1735; and a seven hundred-year-old silk tapestry from China depicting a Cosmological Mandala...just to name seven. 

Below are a few of the featured items.  For further information and to see many more of what came to the Met these last thirty years, visit their online catalog.

The only existing set (I believe) of medieval playing cards.

The teensy-weensy, o-how-did-those-Byzantines-make-their-art-without-going-blind pointer tip.

 

The AMAZING Autograph Quilt created by Adeline Harris Sears, a young woman from Rhode Island, who sent pieces of white silk to important world figures and asked for them to inscribe their names.  The autographs then went into her quilt.  Among those who obliged were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and seven presidents, including Abraham Lincoln.

The Striding Horned Demon, which the Met only acquired in 2007, and which dates back to the beginning of cities...in ancient Sumer around 3000 BC!!

The Duccio--arguably de Montebello's most publicized acquisition--dubbed the Mona Lisa of the Met.

This ridiculously elaborate French armoire I never liked. 

And this I either loved or hated depending on the day.

 

But I could never get enough of the van Gogh that hung to its left...it helped keep me warm this frigid winter.

 

 

Today in Big Apple History--Incorporated and Opened

What major transportation hub opened 96 years ago today?

What local enterprise incorporated 356 years ago today?

Answers after the jump.